Jack Ridl Visting Writers Series: Mark Winegardner, novel

The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature novelist Mak Winegardner on Tuesday, March 26th, at 7 p.m. in the Knickerbocker Theatre.

Mark Winegardner, who writes fiction and nonfiction, is the Burroway Professor of English. He was born and raised inBryan,Ohio, near what was once known as Exit 2, a town of 8,000 which supplies the world with its Dum-Dum suckers and Etch A Sketches. He is the winner of a University Teaching Award (2004) and a University Mentoring Award (2006). He has also won grants, fellowships and residencies from the Ohio Arts Council, the Lilly Endowment, the Ragdale Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo.

Winegardner's books have been translated into more than twenty languages and sold almost two million copies worldwide. They have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List and in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, the New York Public Library, The American Library Association, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Sun-Times. In 2004, Cleveland Magazine named Crooked River Burning the best book ever written aboutCleveland.

His work has appeared in such magazines as Doubletake, GQ, Men's Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, Playboy, Ploughshares, Story Quarterly, and TriQuarterly. The varied subjects of his nonfiction have included art forgery, Cuban defectors, Congressman Louis Stokes, the Clown Prince of Baseball, the Southern Literary Mafia, and beer. He also helped write the script for The Godfather video game (all platforms), creating original dialogue performed by such actors as James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Marlon Brando.

For additional information visit hope.edu/vws. The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at86 E. Eighth St.